Red Navy’s first kill discovered in Gulf of Finland

Russian naval history enthusiasts supported by the Russian Navy have discovered a British destroyer which was sent down by torpedoes fired by a Red Navy submarine in 1919.

Torn into several parts, the HMS Vittoria is lying keel-up under 30 meters of seawater in the eastern part of the Gulf of Finland.

In the summer of 1919, it was part of a British operation to back attempts by the Northwestern Army of General Nikolai Yudenich to retake Petrograd, now St Petersburg, from the Bolsheviks. The attempts failed, and the destroyer, just two years old at the time, fell prey of the Red Navy’s Pantera submarine. On August 31, it took two torpedoes in the hull.

The sinking became the first victory scored by the Soviet Red Navy. In 1923, the Pantera’s captain Alexander Bakhtin became the first Soviet submariner to be awarded the Order of the Red Banner.

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